We are finally in The Keys to begin serving as topside science support for Mission 31. Yesterday was our travel day. We stopped packing and planning (as much as a scientist ever does) and actually got on a plane to Miami.

Scientists don't travel light, though. As much as we planned ahead and shipped a bunch of our gear down, we still arrived with a large amount of luggage. The boxes and bags shown in these pictures are only about 1/3 of all of the scuba gear, science equipment, and clothing that we brought with us.

Our first task upon arrival was to head over to the Aquarius Reef Base to meet the crew in charge and get our bearings. Then, it was off to the production house where we tried on our new Mission 31 wetsuits and got our Team Member T-Shirts. Our last job of the night was to turn our kitchen/living room into a mobile lab where we will be staining plankton and preserving sponge cells.

Last but not least, today was Saturation Day! We went down to the docks to send-off Northeastern's Liz Magee, MIT's Grace Young, Mission 31's Director of Photography Matt Ferraro as they head out to the Aquarius habitat (their home sweet home for next two weeks). We said goodbye, but we know that we'll see Liz, Grace, and Matt out on the reef during our research dives.

I look forward to sharing more experiences with you and can't wait to finally get diving this morning.

Only a few days left before the big trip to Florida. We are very busy doing last minute preparations: finishing up lab experiments, training, planning, and packing. Yesterday, we shipped 10 large boxes of equipment to Florida (a future post will show how I tried to put all 10 boxes in my little fiesta). We are bringing a lot of science to Aquarius and a little bit of me feels like we packed the whole Helmuth lab away to Florida.Packing for Mission 31 gave me a chance to look through all the equipment we have in the Helmuth Lab, and now I want to highlight some of the awesome instruments we use everyday (along with some we bought just for Mission 31).

My common arsenal of field gear: Don't under estimate reliability the duct tape and zip ties.

My favourite instrument in the lab is definitely the YSI EXO 2 sonde. Alli has already touched on what the sonde will be measuring in Florida, however the sonde can do so much more than just measure dissolved oxygen. In terms of water quality data loggers, the EXO 2 has the complete package with seven different sensors that measure nine parameters in the ocean (Temperature, Salinity, Depth, Chlorophyll, Blue-green algae, Turbidity, Dissolved organics, Dissolved oxygen and pH). If you only bring one oceanic monitoring instrument on your next research trip: make it the EXO 2 sonde.

The sonde fully loaded (left), The sonde under maintenance with sensors out (right)

Currently, there are only seven sensors that are compatible with the sonde. But as different types of sensors are developed (such as nutrient or wave sensors), we will be able to create different combinations of sensors for specific monitoring projects by just plugging them into the sonde.

Aside from the sonde being able to clean itself, the coolest part about this instrument is that it is fully bluetooth operated. We can go caveman style and plug the sonde to a computer through an usb cable, but why go wired when we can go wireless!

Calibrating the algae sensor...done!

Just swipe with a magnet next to the sonde and the bluetooth is turned on. The wireless connection can display live reading, schedule deployment, download data, sensors maintenance check, calibrate and so much more!

In the comfort of the lab, wireless verses cable might seem trivial. But when we are out in the field, in the heat or in the cold, being able to connect to loggers without cables goes a very long way. We will be seeing a lot more wireless loggers in the coming years, and I believe wireless loggers are the future in field data collection. The ease of wireless data collection will give us more live, up-to-date, and relevant data from the Earth's ever changing environments.

Happy Birthday to what would be Jacques Cousteau's 104th birthday today! As stated in previous blogs, he was a strong leader in studying our oceans and I am so grateful to be included in the science for Mission 31. I've wanted to study coral reefs since the first grade and am very fortunate to have this opportunity during my first year as a PhD student at Northeastern. With our arrival to Aquarius less than a week away lots of progress is being made to finalize the details for our time down at Aquarius.The past few weeks I have been working on assembling the traps that will be used to monitor zooplankton around the Aquarius habitat. Zooplankton are thought to be a possible solution for some coral's recovery from bleaching. When corals are living in a stressful environment, (i.e. increased temperatures), their symbiotic algae that lives inside of them is expelled. This algae provides both nutrients as well as the beautiful colors normally associated with corals, so when expelled the corals are white, hence the term bleaching. Some corals have shown that if they change their diet to feed more heavily on zooplankton, they will be able to survive. Unfortunately, limited work has been done looking at zooplankton dynamics on coral reefs. That's why this mission is providing a great opportunity for a larger time frame of investigating the distribution and diversity of zooplankton on Conch Reef.

Little copepods under the microscope. Image from NOAA Ocean Explorer

While you may think these tiny creatures simply float aimlessly through the ocean, they actually control their movement within the water column. Zooplankton follow a vertical migration pattern where they stay near the bottom during the day to avoid getting eaten by fish higher in the water column. Then at night they move up toward the surface where they are able to feed and are protected from predators by the darkness. To investigate how many and which types of zooplankton are showing this migration pattern on the reef, I constructed demersal zooplankton traps to collect them. The traps will be assembled over three different substrates around the habitat to test any differences between sand, live algae, and coral/sponge coverage for zooplankton patterns. At dusk, the traps will be assembled and any zooplankton that move up will get caught in the jar attached to the top. In the morning the aquanauts will swim and collect all of the jars and preserve the samples.

Working on labeling zooplankton sample storage containers and building plankton traps (bottom right hand corner)

To investigate zooplankton on the reef during the day, the aquanauts will swim in the afternoon over a 50m plankton net at three different heights. This will allow for a comparison between zooplankton found during the day and at night on the reef. Additionally, when Northeastern arrives at Aquarius we will incorporate vertical tows which will allow us to get a sample containing all of the zooplankton in a water column at once as well as doing tows from the boat at the surface.

Plankton net used for daily plankton tows (Thanks Grace Young for assembling!)

I then get to identify and quantify the zooplankton in each of the samples after the mission is complete. I am very excited to have this widespread dataset to begin better understanding zooplankton dynamics on this reef. I then hope to continue similar experiments on a few other reefs to learn more about what specific factors result in zooplankton dynamics on reefs, and how feasible it is for them to be a true recovery mechanism from coral bleaching. -Amanda

To start things off, HAPPY WORLD OCEANS DAY* everyone! I hope you all got a chance to enjoy time by a lake, river, ocean, bathtub, or whatever today and consider just how amazing the World Oceans are. This morning, I went on a dive off a beach in Rockport, MA, there was great visibility and a plethora of marine invertebrates (those things without backbones) to see, but I really can't wait until I am diving on my favorite habitat with my all time favorite invertebrates again! For those that don't know me (and even those that do), I have a small confession to make: I am obsessed with coral. Not the "coral reef," but the actual organism. I am what some people call a cork, or coral-dork. ...OK before you all stop reading because you think I am crazy for loving some plant-like rock, let me tell you some more about these fascinating creatures and our Mission 31 coral science project, and then you can judge me at the end.

From left to right: Coral reef --> Coral Colony --> Coral Polyp

First of all, corals are animals, not plants, rocks, or a superposition of the two. Corals are part of the Phylum Cnidaria, this taxonomic group also includes animals like jellyfish and anemones. Corals are divided into two groups: the hard and the soft corals. Soft corals are corals like sea fans that don't have calcium carbonate skeletons. Hard corals are the major reef building corals that do have calcium carbonate skeletons. From now on, I will only be talking about hard corals, order Scleractinia, because they're my favorites... and because our research during Mission 31 will be focused on them. Coral reefs are formed by different colonies of of coral. Each coral colony is made up of many individual, genetically identical units called polyps that cover a shared skeleton. Check out this awesome slow-life video to see some neat coral behavior!

The Anatomy of a Coral Polyp

Every polyp has its own mouth, food-grabbers / defense-arms (tentacles), throat (pharynx), and stomach (coelenteron). A polyp can function by itself but it benefits from being a part of a group, just like you can live fine on your own but its nice to have shared resources from your family and friends. Polyps are connected by canals. The system of polyp-stomachs and connecting canals in a colony is called its gastrovascular system -- sort of like a coral's version of a human's circulatory and digestive system combined into one. The gastrovascular system functions for digestion and distributes materials to other parts of the organism. Instead of having blood or digestive juices going through this system, the main fluid involved is water. Corals drive the flow of water through their gastrovascular system by having an immense amount of cilia (small whip-like structures) lining their inner skin layer. Corals can have two types of gastrovascular systems, perforate or imperforate. Perforate corals have an “internal plumbing system” that connects all polyps to the entire colony; imperforate corals do not. Perforate species’ internal plumbing system gives them an extended fluid volume for buffering chemical changes or increasing the rapidity with which they exchange fluid with the environment or other polyps. Imperforate corals do not possess the ability of fluid exchange at the whole colony level, since individual polyps are only connected to their nearest neighbors, and only when the polyps are expanded.

Top: Perforate and Imperforate coral on a reef; Bottom: Perforate and Imperforate coral in lab

﻿"I stick expensive things into mouths of small underwater animals that look like flowers to find out how they deal with stress."﻿

Diagram of the oxygen microsensor that we use to probe coral

The Patterson Lab at Northeastern University is studying the coral gastrovascular system as it relates to how corals respond to environmental stressors. If I had to describe our research to a 6 year old, I would say something like this: "I stick expensive things into mouths of small underwater animals that look like flowers to find out how they deal with stress." Now in a bit more detail... In the Patterson lab, we use oxygen and pH micro sensors to find out how changing ocean conditions affect oxygen and pH dynamics of the coral gastrovascular system. So far, all of our work has been done in the lab (see picture below) and I am very excited** to get our equipment out onto the reef to get a lot of really good measurements in coral from the field. We will be leaving corals instrumented with the micro sensors for 24 hour periods to get a really good idea of what is going on in the gastrovascular system in a reef coral. We will be measuring the environmental conditions as well, since they can chafe quite a lot over the course of the day and this can add stress to a coral. By seeing how corals deal with every-day stress, we can make predictions on who they will react to changing ocean conditions over a longer period of time. We are also comparing the two types of gastrovascular systems, imperforate and perforate. During Mission 31, we will only be making measurements in an imperforate coral, M. cavernosa, but when we do experiments in the lab, we also study a perforate coral, A. cervicornis.

Me, doing what I love to do, probing corals in our old lab!

More coral probing, but this time in our brand new coral system at the Marine Science Center!

"No Blue, No Green." - Sylvia Earle

SO are corals your new favorite animal? Did I change your mind about coral, or at least that maybe I'm not too crazy? I know, corals might not be as cute as a puppy or as stunning as a tiger (vertebrates get all the love), but they are very important for the health of our oceans. Coral reefs are some of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet. They provide many services vital to human society such as fisheries, coastal protection, building materials, biochemical compounds for medicine, and tourism. Not everyone has the opportunity to see a living, wild coral reef, but everyone benefits from having them around. Corals aren't just pretty objects, they kind of form the backbone of the ocean (even if they don't have an actual backbone...). And the ocean is the main support system for the planet. We depend upon coral reefs and our oceans for so much, so this World Oceans Day, please consider taking a step to help protect out oceans. You can find some great ideas on how to do this, here.

I could keep talking about coral, but I'll give you a break ...for now. And I really should get back to preparing for the Surface Team's "Splashdown" since it is only a week away! I have so much packing left to do! I also need to find a coral-sitter for while I am gone...

If you have any questions about coral, feel free to ask them in the comments or get ahold of me via twitter!Best Fishes,~Sara

*Technically it is not World Oceans day anymore... #latenightbloggingproblems**And by excited, I mean really really nervous about breaking the expensive probes while dealing with being underwater... but in a good way #marinescienceproblems

It's fair to ask what an institution from the frigid waters of New England has in common with Fabien Cousteau's Mission 31 on the coral reefs of Florida. As it turns out, lots.

In addition to a long history of working on coral reefs and with the Aquarius habitat, Mark Patterson and I (Brian Helmuth) are part of Northeastern University's recently launched Urban Coastal Sustainability Initiative which brought our two labs to the NU's Marine Science Center in Nahant. We are excited not only about the science of coral reefs, but also what it takes to live sustainably with the sea, and FIU's Aquarius and Fabien Cousteau's Mission 31 provide the perfect opportunity to explore these ideas and share them with the world.

Our marine lab in Nahant, MA is fortuitously situated on the tip of a peninsula that is influenced both by the open waters of the Gulf of Maine and the urban shores of Boston and Lynn. The location of the lab provides a unique opportunity to study how climate change is altering urban coastal environments like ours and, more importantly, to figure out what we can proactively do about it. Like other marine scientists we have observed the deterioration of the oceans from overfishing, pollution, plastics and climate change, and are alarmed at what the future holds for our kids. The same factors are affecting the reefs surrounding Aquarius: increasing temperatures have led to bleaching and disease, and nutrient and sediment run off from land threatens corals and sponges. By the end of the Mission, with the very cool techniques for detecting pollution used by our colleague at Northeastern Dr. Loretta Fernandez, we will also hopefully have a sense of whether any residual contaminants from oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico have made their way to the Florida Keys.

Climate change almost never exerts its impacts alone, but interacts with things like coastal development, pollution and overharvesting. While we, like many other scientists, are interested in how ecosystems work on pristine coastlines far from human influence, we especially want to understand the vulnerability of ecosystems that include humans. Our goal is to expand on this knowledge to create cleaner, safer, smarter coastal communities that will be sustainable for many years to come, both for humans and for the ecosystems on which we depend. Mission 31 is the ultimate expression of what we are interested in studying, and Fabien Cousteau the perfect spokesperson for what we all hope to teach the next generation of scientists and policy makers: simply put, if we naively consider ourselves as somehow separate from the natural environment in which we live, bad things will happen.

Aquarius takes this to the extreme- despite all of our technology, the Aquanauts are living on, and as part of, the coral reef and there is no way to escape the fact that despite our best precautions Aquanauts are still subject to the whims of nature. Mark and I have both been in Aquarius when storms have hit, and when that happens you get a rather close up and personal reminder of the power of nature. Aquarius sits on a 120 ton baseplate, but in heavy waves the thing still moves around, making you very conscious of the vast volume of water surrounding you, and the forces that it can exert. And when water starts blurbing up into the wet porch, there is a moment where you truly begin to question just how fail safe human-made structures are. Don't get me wrong- the Aquarius habitat techs are the best in the world at what they do, and I would never hesitate to put myself in their hands- but no human-made structure has ever stood up indefinitely to the power of nature. And in a way that really is the lesson that we're trying to get across: while there are many ways to engineer coastal cities like Boston to adapt to changing climate, in the end, if we refuse to work cooperatively with the ocean, rather than trying fruitlessly to subdue it, nature will inevitably bite us in the rear.

During the last two weeks of the mission, the Northeastern science team will explore everything from sponge and coral physiology to the potential impact of unseen environmental contaminants, but what we will always have in the backs of our minds is, o.k., now what do we DO about it.......?

Northeastern's science team heads to Florida for Mission 31 on June 16, and we are all getting really excited to jump in to the fun. The planning for Mission 31 science has been happening for over a year, but for me the countdown officially began as soon as Liz returned from Aquanaut training. Since then, in addition to testing equipment, finalizing experiments, and making sure all of our dive gear is in working order, my days have been long and jam-packed with our own Mission-31 dive training, which includes lectures, exams, and a number of dives. Liz is incredibly intelligent and knows just about all there is to know about SCUBA- it’s an honor having such an awesome female scientist representing the NU team in saturation! But training has only been part of the M-31 prep… we need to plan for science too!I’m leading a project on the bioenergetics of the giant barrel sponge, Xestospongia muta. Sponges are seriously ancient, in more ways than one. Sponges as a taxonomic group may have been the first animals on the planet, and fossil sponges dating from 635 Million years ago have been found. Work by Joe Pawlik's group at UNC Wilmington also suggests that individual sponges can be as old as 2000 years, making them true "redwoods of the reef." During our two-week mission, we will continuously monitor pumping activity, respiration rate, and feeding rate in a number of these organisms. These in situ (in the field) measurements of metabolic (body fuel burning) activity taken continuously over a relatively long period of time will help us understand the mechanisms driving the flow of energy through these organisms, as well as how natural fluctuations in the environment can impact this flow of energy. Specifically, we want to know how much energy goes into respiration, growth, and repair and replacement of cells. In a nutshell, we are trying to understand how these organisms allocate energy they receive from their food, and to better understand how global climate change may affect these ancient organisms. Sponges may provide a significant amount of energy to organisms higher up the food chain, and are essential recyclers of nutrients on the reef. In fact, all of the water on a reef passes through the body of a sponge every 24-48 hours! So, understanding how the environment impacts the flow of energy through sponges also gives us insight on how environmental change may impact the functioning of the entire reef.

Giant Barrel Sponge: they are known as the Redwoods of the sea. They can live hundreds of years...and they are red. (photo by NOAA photo library)

We just received our brand new HOBO Dissolved Oxygen (DO) Loggers in the mail (yeah!), so for now I’ll just focus on how I plan to measure one of the metabolic processes mentioned above: Respiration Rate.

During the mission, we will measure rate of oxygen uptake, i.e. the amount of oxygen removed by the sponge per unit time. Throughout the mission, two sponges at a time will each be equipped with a YSI water quality sonde, which will measure dissolved oxygen (as well as many other parameters) in the excurrent flow of the sponge (in the barrel of the sponge).

YSI EXO2 sonde Water Quality Sonde: This fancy piece of equipment usually lives bolted to a rock on Pump House Beach, where it continuously measures water quality in a rocky intertidal shore right outside the Marine Science Center in Nahant, MA. But it's making the trip to FL with us for Mission 31, where it will be used to understand metabolic activity of the giant barrel sponge.

﻿We will additionally deploy an Onset Corporation dissolved oxygen logger near the sponge’s incurrent flow (the outside of the sponge) to measure the available surrounding dissolved oxygen. This way, by comparing oxygen measurements from inside and outside of the sponge we will be able to calculate the amount of oxygen removed from ambient water per unit time (i.e. respiration rate!) ﻿

We will deploy HOBO Dissolved Oxygen (DO) Loggers like this one near the incurrent flow of the sponges. Measurements of ambient DO, along with measurements of DO in the excurrent flow, will allow us to calculate respiration rate (amount of oxygen removed per unit time).

T-minus 11 days until we leave, and I am only getting more excited! I’m also a little nervous, though. For one, some of the equipment we are bringing with us is brand new, expensive, and I have never used it before. Brian and Mark have used this kind of equipment lots before and say that when you put expensive toys out into the ocean you just need to hope for the best and count on occasional losses, but this is all pretty new to me. I think I will bring a couple of the DO loggers with me on one of our upcoming dives in Nahant to make sure I am comfortable using them in the field.

The Northeastern team manages to carve out some time for fun, too :) Too bad Nick Colvard (far right) can't be here with us in MA during the countdown to NU splashdown... but I'm sure honeymooning in Greece isn't too terrible of an alternative ;)

When I tell people that I'll be conducting research in the Florida Keys as part of Northeastern University's surface team for Mission 31, they probably envision white sand beaches, rainbow-colored reefs stretching for miles, and golden sunsets.

What they don't realize is that before I get to dive here:

Photo: Tracy Hajduk, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries

I have to dive here:

Photo: Brian Helmuth, Northeastern University

Now, don't get me wrong: I love diving in New England, where sandy bottoms settle to reveal rays, mating horseshoe crabs or a flounder or two, and rocky walls are encrusted with anemones, tunicates, mussels, and more. But the water off of Nahant (where Northeastern's Marine Science Center is located) was 55 degrees today, while the water in Key Largo was around 80 degrees. Also, as diverse as the Gulf of Maine can be, it just doesn't have the same number and variety of species found in a biodiversity hotspot like a coral reef.

After almost a year of planning, it is FANTASTIC to see Mission 31 get underway! Fabien and his team have put in such tremendous efforts that it is really gratifying to see all of that hard work come to fruition. Like so many others, my childhood dreams were fueled by Jacques Cousteau and his team of explorers and scientists. and I think it is fair to say that I would not be a marine biologist without his influence. As Francis said in his last post, it is with mixed emotions that I look back to where undersea exploration was 50 years ago, and where we are today.

In some ways we are light years ahead of where we were in terms of technology, and the high speed cameras, oxygen electrodes, and 360 camera system that we will be using during the Mission were only dreamt of. As a father of two daughters I am absolutely thrilled to see so many young women taking part in Mission 31. Inclusivity has been a message that Fabien has been pushing since day 1, and to see so many women scientists involved (Liz and Grace in saturation, and Alli, Amanda, Jessica and Sara topside) gives me hope that my daughters may not need to face the same ordeals that so many of my female colleagues have had to endure. Simone Melchior, Fabien's grandmother, was the first female aquanaut, and lived in Conshelf II during the historic mission 50 years ago. It is an unfortunate sign of the times that her participation was seldom mentioned. Not so today. But to me the saddest part- as Francis alluded to in his post- is that so many of us seem to have forgotten how to dream. Watching "World without Sun" the viewer can feel that we were on the precipice of something amazing as new worlds were opened up through the window of Cousteau's underwater cameras.

The science we will be doing on this Mission will be cutting edge, and hopefully what we learn can better arm society to help protect a rapidly changing ocean. But to me, what excites me most is that Mission 31 may start to rekindle that lost connection to the sea, so that some day my daughters can look back and say "wow, humans really came close to messing things up. But somehow we found our connection to nature just in time to turn things around."

I think I speak for all of us when I say we are very grateful to Fabien to have the opportunity to participate in this historic mission, and that we can't wait to join in the fun in two weeks!

THe nu Surface Team﻿

We are graduate students and faculty from the Marine Science Center at Northeastern University. We will be sharing our personal daily Mission 31 experiences here! Visit northeastern.edu/mission31 to learn more about who we are and about the science that we will be doing with Fabien during the second half of Mission 31.